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Any expats using YNAB? Wondering how you deal with having transactions in different countries. Right now I have two different budgets, but it's making it hard to get that big-picture look at my spending.
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Nov 20, 2018 18:12
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I’m looking into PocketSmith which has multi currency support. It’ll automatically convert your holdings into a base currency and show you a global overview. The subscription model is kind of a pain in the rear end and I’m not really digging how it handles transactions but this is might just be me being used to YNAB.
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Nov 21, 2018 13:55
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nYNAB is exclusively web-based. The app is strictly for inputting transactions and some other basic tasks. I have no idea why they haven’t added a full income v. Expense report to the app since that would be real useful to getting an on the fly look at your current status.
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Dec 1, 2018 14:01
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I tried that for about a month but it was too much hassle and veered me dangerously close to just not bothering with budgeting. Cash transactions + once a week manual input has been my sweet spot.
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Dec 2, 2018 01:59
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It's not "literally 12 seconds" for me, and trying to force myself to do it would frustrate me enough to consider not doing it at all. For me and my wife this was what was workable for us.
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Dec 2, 2018 16:12
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Yeah, sorry, this got weirdly aggressive. My point was just that the full YNAB experience can sometimes be a bit overwhelming and you can still get a lot out of it even if you aren't meticulously writing down every transaction and checking your budget before every purchase.
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Dec 2, 2018 20:45
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Re: dual country budgeting: I've been doing it for about 6 months now and here's my takeaways: I started out with two separate distinct budgets for each currency, which worked fine as long I was basically almost not touching most of the money in one of them. Nowadays I have frequent transactions on both which led me to not have a big picture view of my spending, ie: I would use both my US and local credit cards to pay for groceries in my home country and end up having to mentally stitch together both budgets. I also have income from both countries now, so again I was getting an incomplete picture of my daily finances by keeping two budgets. My "solution" ended up being this: 1. Choose a main currency, it should probably be the one where you have your primary residence, source of income and most of your expenditures. 2. Create a budget that has only your checking/cash accounts and credit cards for both countries. 3. Go to ynab.rmillan.com and use that to automatically convert transactions from your foreign accounts into the local currency. The site will do this once a day. 4. One of your issues will be that any money in your foreign checking account will show up as "available" but in reality you won't easily be able to use that to pay for all local expenditures (ie: it's no good for me to have $1000 available for budgeting if I can't use it to pay rent). You will need budget that money in to foreign expenditures only, or it might be easier to just budget all of that into foreign credit card payments, like I do. 5. Savings accounts should be set up as tracking accounts. There is no "clean" way to handle inflows from them, but in theory you should want to know how often you're having to dip into savings anyways. You will 100% have to develop your own tricks to deal with your particular situations, but eventually it will be "good enough" which is as much as you can hope for.
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Jan 7, 2019 17:35
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Fresh Start deletes all your transactions which is real dumb.
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Jan 13, 2019 05:38
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FateFree posted:I know but it copies your old budget. Maybe you can fresh start, open the copy, fresh start again and have two copies. Yeah but what he wants is to gently caress around with his existing budget, including transactions. I wanted to do this when I wanted to recategorize a bunch of stuff that normally just went to Inflow but I was afraid it would mess with my balances. If you’re minimally comfortable with Excel it’s “easier” to export your budget into CSV, apply a filter that spits out your individual accounts and then manually reimport them into a fresh start.
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Jan 13, 2019 16:57
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It is extremely annoying that I can't sort the expense reports by the highest spending sub category.
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May 5, 2019 23:52
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Go to "All Accounts" (or the Account you're interested in) and in the filter category you could put in "After: 2019/05/01, Category: Transportation, " and that should do what you need (note that "After" actually includes the start date, ie: "On or After"). You can't export those results, which is dumb. If you need it in Excel or something like that, you're going to have to export your whole Budget and do some custom filters in Excel.
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May 21, 2019 17:43
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Mikey Purp posted:What's the best way to keep track of an interest free debt made on a credit card where you also make other purchases? Not sure I get what you mean, but it seems like you could just create a "Payoff Amount" category and set a Goal for the target amount?
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Jun 8, 2019 23:20
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FYI one of the YNAB extensions dumps all of our account balances and transactions into a Google Sheet. https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/sheets_for_ynab/299979094355 I honestly get a lot of mileage out of it because I like having needlessly complicated spreadsheets that add little utility to my life. It also makes it a lot easier to filter and export transactions. The one caveat I'd make is that a) for some reasons all my transactions were imported with the date off by one day (easily fixable with a formula) and b) it's clearly been abandoned by the creator so if it doesn't work for you as is, then don't expect fixes coming any day soon.
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Jun 27, 2019 21:06
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Since you aren’t doing auto import here’s my manual import tips that I wish I had known at the start: 1. Create a Google Sheet with a tab for each account you have. 2. Figure out the easiest to copy paste movements from your home banking website to the sheet. For some of mine I can just copy paste directly off the site itself and it’ll automatically sort into rows and columns, others I can download movements as an excel file or csv and then copy off that. 3. Once you’ve pasted the original data, rename the relevant column to its YNAB equivalent: Date, Payee, Memo, and Amount for columns that have both negative and positive values, or Outflow and Inflow if they’re in separate columns. Any other columns you can ignore as YNAB won’t read them. I hide them to avoid clutter, but don’t delete them. 4. On the Google Sheet: File, Download as CSV for each tab. 5. Import the relevant CSV into each YNAB account. 6. Going forward you should only need to copy paste new movements. I do it about once a week, by now I can do it in about 5-10 minutes if there’s no weirdness from the bank. For me this has been 1000% better than every other option I explored. Also, you can keep all movements you’ve already imported in the sheet, YNAB auto ignores those.
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Sep 1, 2019 16:50
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None of my banks do OFX plus they’re not in English so just a straight import wont work anyway. IDK if Swedish banks have the same issue. YNAB is basically designed with American banks in mind, so in my case a little bit of setup to standardize everything saves A LOT of time down the road. Also this way you have one neat database instead of dozens of separate files.
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Sep 1, 2019 19:47
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listrada posted:I relocated abroad and was trying to manage two currencies in one budget with no auto-import. This kind of craziness put me about 5 minutes away from writing a script over my recent bank transactions to find whatever combination/s of charges could sum up to the amount that was inexplicably missing. I gave up and split the currencies into different budgets so I don't have this problem as often, but maybe I should still write that script. It would come in handy occasionally. Yeah, I’m dual currency as well and after trying unified budgets in either currency, I’ve finally settled for separate budgets. FWIW I use a Google Sheets plugin that spits out budgets into a sheet, I then use Google Finance formulas to convert amounts to USD and once a month I import both budgets into a unified budget, so I have an overall picture of my finances. It’s a bit of work but I need to do this anyway for tax purposes.
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Sep 13, 2019 04:48
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If you don’t assign it to “To Be Budgeted”, YNAB just treats is at as an Outflow except with a positive value. It’s useful to avoid having your Inflows full of one off deposits like friends paying you back some money or whatever.
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Sep 21, 2019 19:50
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The opposite, that's technically not money you can use to cover other expenses (well, you could, if you hate your grandparents). Even if you're going to use the money for whatever, it's probably better to assign it to the kids sports category and then free up the money by going to the "Available" cell and moving the money to "To Be Budgeted". If you do this, then YNAB never counts it as an Inflow, it's just counted against your expenses. The only scenario where I guess you'd want it to hit "To Be Budgeted" first if you know you're going to consistently be using your parent's money as an extra income source and then you'll fund the "kid's sports" category with other available funds as they come in. I do this with, for example, Credit Card bonuses and cashbacks, where normally they'd go to the specific card's budget, but really I just set them to inflow so I can track how much money I made off them and then just pay off the card with "other" funds.
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Sep 22, 2019 00:54
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I've personally never had issues with how the "Available/Budgeted" aspect of CCs in YNAB, but I could never for the life of me get a To Be Budgeted number that made sense given my balances while I used it. Turning them into Checking Accounts fixed that up. $80 bucks is a pain in the rear end though, but I'm also using it for tracking business expenses and the "Import to Google Sheets" plug-in has been super handy so I'm getting some mileage out of the app that most people don't. dpkg chopra fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Oct 3, 2019 |
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Oct 3, 2019 18:25
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Jato posted:For this situation I've found that I just have to manually go into the CC payment category and subtract the amount of the refund. It goes back into To be Budgeted and all is well. Before I realized this it did seem like some weird fuckery was going on though. Not in Europe but I do live abroad and use YNAB and two budgets has pretty much been the only way to stay sane. A single budget ends up with too many mismatched transactions due to currency differences. I keep a category for "Int'l Transfers" for when I move money from one currency to the other, but I try to avoid that as well. The main disadvantage is you don't have a global overview of your assets/spending, especially if you use your US cards regularly. I "solved" that by using the "YNAB to Gsheets" app, applying some Gsheets magic and then reimporting everything to a third budget. It's not ideal but it works. Let me know if you're interested and I'll do a small write up on that.
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Oct 4, 2019 16:08
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I deposit cash back rewards into my checking account (instead of have them applied as statement credit) to make them easier to track and it also avoids YNAB issues.
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Dec 12, 2019 15:01
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Shout out to the budgeting nerds who are spending their first day of 2020 closing out their 2019 budgets and bringing down YNAB
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Jan 1, 2020 20:29
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Since we're bitching about it, how does YNAB still not have mass Payee editing?
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Jan 1, 2020 21:31
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Yeah you can Payee merge, and a kind of hack is just creating whatever you want the new Payee to be and merging all the old ones into that, but it's clunky and also it doesn't work for Transfers. The practical example is where I'll import transactions from an off-budget account and set them to their own category. Later down the line I'll decide to integrate the off-budget account into my budget, and now I have 400 transactions that I can't convert into a transfer so I have to reimport them (which has its own set of issues) It sounds like a bit of a niche problem but googling around it seems a bunch of people have asked for it and apparently you could it in YNAB4 so it isn't clear why they didn't include it in nYNAB
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Jan 1, 2020 22:15
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FYI you can change the Starting Balance date of any account and YNAB will retroactively download any past transactions starting on that date. You'll have to manually categorize all of the old transactions (as opposed to YNAB doing it for you automatically after the first one), but it's doable.
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Jan 14, 2020 16:16
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YNAB's philosophy has been a good north star, but their "best practices" heavily depend on you being a perfectly spherical budgeter in a frictionless vacuum.
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Jan 14, 2020 19:35
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Legit jealous of all of y’all who’ve convinced your partners to log every purchase into YNAB. I’ve managed to get her to log (most) cash entries so that’s a start.
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Jan 19, 2020 04:15
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Not in the US, cash is still a big part of spending here. I thought we were talking about logging all purchases regardless of payment method, anyway.
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Jan 19, 2020 14:48
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Congrats man, you got dealt a poo poo hand and are killing it, anyway. Keep it up.
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Jan 19, 2020 15:58
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I really wish YNAB would add a receipt scanner (or just a simple photo option) so I could attach a copy to its related transaction.
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Jan 27, 2020 15:34
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TraderStav posted:I as well, but I’ve been so successful with maintaining my budget I guess I’m getting bored and looking for ways to improve the process and get better insights. Idle hands... I think that might've been me, but in any case I'm glad someone else out there is also wasting way too much time on their budgets, like me. Just FYI, at least for me Sheets for YNAB imports the wrong date for transactions, it's always exactly one date early, which you can fix in another sheet (don't use the same sheet where you import as the app replaces all contents every time). Also you should take a look at Zapier's YNAB integrations if you're into this kind of thing.
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Jan 27, 2020 18:18
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For those of you that make manual imports, how often do you do it? I try to do it weekly but lately life has been chaos and now I'm way behind.
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Jan 29, 2020 14:26
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I'm self employed and mostly keep my business expenses separate from my regular expenses. I have separate bank accounts, and my business accounts are not on my regular YNAB. When my business "pays" me money, I mark it as "Business Income" on YNAB and set it to Inflow: To be Budgeted. I'm less clear on what to do when I "contribute" money to my business to cover unexpected expenses or new projects. Over the years I've alternated between having a "Business Contributions" category or just setting those expenses as a negative Inflow. On the one hand it's useful to have a simple red number to gauge how much I've contributed, on the other hand I end up having an artificially high Inflow. Was just wondering if other people here are in the same situation and have any insights.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:22
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Yeah Capital One has basically not worked in months with some rare exceptions.
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Jul 7, 2020 19:08
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+$100 to cash account, category Anime or Inflow depending on your budgeting preferences (I'd go with Anime). -$100 from your cash account to your CC payment. You'll now have an overbudget of $100 in your CC payment category which you'll cover from either the +$100 you'll have in your Anime category, or from Inflow.
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Dec 29, 2020 19:42
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If you don’t want a cash account just set up a “Cash” payee that you just use to keep track of where that money came from and that way you don’t have to reconcile an extra account.
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Dec 30, 2020 02:59
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Sockser posted:Fwiw I do annual fresh starts, mostly to keep nynab loading quickly, but I also keep a “long term” budget, in which I just update my monthly balances for all my accounts at the same time I pay off my credit cards and reconcile my accounts for the month in my regular budget, just so I can look at my net worth long term YNAB being able to have some sort of referral/linking system to other budgets (like maybe have it as a tracking account or whatever) would be a Godsend for more than one reason but I would just settle for it being loving possible to import loving categories, what the gently caress. Or being able to duplicate an existing budget so I can try something out without loving over 2 years of transactions in mysterious ways. Again, what the gently caress.
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Jan 4, 2021 00:43
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I get the first "step" of CCs: paying something with a CC "pays off" the relevant category, and then budgets an equivalent amount towards the CC payment. Bing bang bong, so simple. But then you actually pay off your CC, and next month the money budgeted towards CC payments never quite adds up, and if you make a manual adjustment it makes things even worse. IDK, I'm sure that if I took the time to read up on the YNAB help documents about CCs it'd eventually make sense but it's not worth it to me. dpkg chopra fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Apr 12, 2021 |
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Apr 12, 2021 15:55
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There's an integration for YNAB that allows you to import your transactions to Google Sheets. I use that to do some more complex stuff with my budgets. I don't use Power BI but honestly integrating with YNAB might just be a good excuse to learn.
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Aug 3, 2021 20:08
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I have a weird budgeting situation and was hoping for some insight: A friend of mine (who lives abroad) is staying at my place for a couple of months. We worked out that they'll chip in on rent and a fixed percent of groceries/toiletries/utilities. At the beginning of this month he wired me a lump sum equal to about to what I estimated his part would be for the next two months and told me to just take out whatever I needed and give him back the remainder, if any, at the end. So now I have an inflow in my checking account categorized as "Guest's share" or whatever. The "correct" way would be for me to split out a % of every relevant transaction and categorize that too as "Guest's share", but that's a pain in the rear end. The "easy" way is for me to add up every relevant transaction over a period of time and then just take that amount of of "Guest's share", but now I don't have a corresponding transaction. I could make a fake one but now I'm essentially double spending (first in the relevant category and then in the fake transaction). Any suggestions on how to make this work within YNAB as painlessly as possible? Edit: yes I know that the easiest way is to just set the money as an inflow and do this in a separate spreadsheet but I have brain worms and enjoy it when the numbers match. Also it's not impossible that they might stay a bit longer so having a system so having some sort of automation for this might pay off eventually. dpkg chopra fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Oct 13, 2021 |
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Oct 13, 2021 15:09
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